We
have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that
correspond with them.
Abigail Adams

Words
are the physicians of the mind diseased.
Aeschylus

The
language of truth is unadorned and always simple.
Marcellinus Ammianus

Drawing
on my fine command of language, I said nothing.
Anonymous

The
kindest word in all the world is the unkind word, unsaid.
Anonymous

Kindness:
a language the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Anonymous

The
easiest way to save face is to keep the lower half shut.
Anonymous

Foolishness
always results when the tongue outraces the brain.
Anonymous

Never
miss a good chance to shut up.
Anonymous

The
words you choose to say something are just as important as
the decision to speak.
Anonymous

I
just wish my mouth had a backspace key.
Anonymous

The
most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't
being said.
Anonymous

Keep
your words soft and tender because tomorrow you may have to
eat them.
Anonymous

Talk
is cheap because supply exceeds demand.
Anonymous

Never
argue with a fool. Someone watching may not be able to tell
the difference.
Anonymous

When
you're arguing with a fool, make sure he isn't doing the same
thing.
Anonymous

The
only weapon that becomes sharper with constant use is the
tongue.
Anonymous

How
many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion!
Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his/her own special
language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences,
profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances
of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language
is pretty remote.
Anonymous

Even
a fish wouldn't get into trouble if he kept his mouth shut.
Anonymous

I
do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it
is an language I do not understand.
Sir Edward Appleton

Let
thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.
Aprocrypha

High
thoughts must have high language.
Aristophanes

All
true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's
teeth.
Antonin Artaud

It's
not what you tell them it's what they hear.
Red Auerbach

A
special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of
language, and for language.
Gaston Bachelard

An
inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings
of mankind.
Walter Bagehot

If
everybody thought before they spoke, the silence would be
deafening.
George Barzan

No
language is rude that can boast polite writers.
Aubrey Beardsley

Drawing
on my find command of language, I said nothing.
Robert Charles Benchley

For
me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.
Ingrid Bengis

Ours
is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon;
instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas,
bright suggestions.
Eric Bentley

Lenin
could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.
Isaiah Berlin

Heaven,
n.: A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with
talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention
while you expound your own.
Ambrose Bierce

Speak
when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will
ever regret.
Ambrose Bierce

Silence
is one of the hardest arguments to refute.
Josh Billings

Language
is the biggest barrier to human progress because language
is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen
into language and force us to look at the world in an old
fashioned way.
Edward de Bono

Self-expression
must pass into communication for its fulfillment.
Pearl S. Buck

The
English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable
at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.
Robert Burchfield

Among
my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
Orson Rega Card

There
are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact
with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four
contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we
say it."
Dale Carnegie

The
dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to
the young.
Willa Cather

Grasp
the subject, the words will follow.
Cato the Elder

It
is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball
slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language
which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and
yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people.
It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers
would like to think so. But compared with it at its best,
English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and
decay.
Raymond Chandler

To
have another language is to possess a second soul.
Charlemagne

One
of the basic causes for all the trouble in the world today
is that people talk too much and think too little. They act
impulsively without thinking. I always try to think before
I talk.
Margaret Chase Smith

Not
the fastest horse can catch a word spoken in anger.
Chinese Proverb

Language
is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are
fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation
are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation
and use of words involves a process of free creation.
Noam Chomsky

Broadly
speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words
best of all.
Sir Winston Churchill

By
swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach.
Winston Churchill

Never
hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is
in the room.
Winston Churchill

In
the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and
I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.
Winston Churchill

From
now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something
up with which I will not put.
Winston Churchill

Language
is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the
trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Works
of imagination should be written in very plain language; the
more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is
to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

To
a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is
but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal
not much more wonderful than a parrot.
Joseph Conrad

I
have noticed that nothing I have never said ever did me any
harm.
Calvin Coolidge

If
you describe things as better than they are, you are thought
a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are,
you are thought a realist; if you describe things as exactly
as they are, then you are thought a satirist.
Quentin Crisp

Two
monologues do not make a dialogue.
Jeff Daly

And
who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our
tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories
shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What
worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with
the accents that are ours?
Samuel Daniel

Even
if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going
to speak it to?
Clarence Darrow

The
individual's whole experience is built upon the plan of his
language.
Henri Delacroix

There
is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community,
and communication.... Try the experiment of communicating,
with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially
if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own
attitude toward your experience changing.
John Dewey

Talk
to people about themselves and they will listen for hours.
Benjamin Disraeli

One
of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good
thing to do and always a clever thing to say. Will Durant

Male
supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence
both heralds and affirms it.
Andrea Dworkin

The
words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem
to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical
entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain
signs and more or less clear images.
Albert Einstein

The
finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.
George Eliot

It
is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate
feelings - much harder than to say something fine about them
which is not the exact truth.
George Eliot

Blessed
is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving
evidence of the fact.
George Eliot

Among
provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad
preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it
than at other times.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Language
is a city to the building of which every human being brought
a stone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

We
have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as
much as we speak.
Epictetus

Whenever
two good people argue over principles, they are both right.
Marie Ebner von Eschenbach

The
language of truth is simple.
Euripides

I
tell you everything that is really nothing, and nothing of
what is everything, do not be fooled by what I am saying.
Please listen carefully and try to hear what I am not saying.
Charles C. Finn

Deeds,
not words shall speak me.
John Fletcher

Words
are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some
fall away, a new succession takes their place.
John French

Writing
is a struggle against silence.
Carlos Fuentes

Honest
disagreement is often a good sign of progress.
Mahatma Gandhi

Be
careful of your thoughts; they may become words at any moment.
Ira Gassen

We
live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate
we can imagine or explore. All you have to do to educate a
child is leave them alone and teach them to read. The rest
is brainwashing.
Ellen Gilcrist

The
older I grow the more I listen to people who don't talk much.
Germain G. Glien

Those
who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their
own.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

When
ideas fail, words come in very handy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When
someone does something good, applaud! You'll make two people
happy.
Sam Goldwyn

Dance
is the hidden language of the soul, of the body
Martha Graham

Don't
tell your friends about your indigestion. "How are you" is a greeting, not a question.
Arthur Guiterman

Public
speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal
language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language.
Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell
Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from
General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is
a man's world, so it talks a man's language.
Ursula K. Le Guin

Always
do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you
to keep your mouth shut.
Ernest Hemingway

Everything
becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.
Hermann Hesse

The
proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about
which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin
a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish
up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience,
for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would
be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of
linguistic recursion.
Douglas Hofstadter

There
is no 'cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they
don't need one!
Barbara Holland

Talking
is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the
hands on the strings to stop their vibration as in twanging
them to bring out their music.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Language
is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of
which they grow.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Once
a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.
Horace

Don't
knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start
a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.
Kin Hubbard

The
only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.
Kin Hubbard

Grammar
and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone
of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the
sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we
say have double meaning.
Rosenstock Huessy

The
right to be heard does not automatically include the right
to be taken seriously.
Hubert H. Humphrey

Every
individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the
linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary
inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records
of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms
him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness
and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all
too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual
things.
Aldous Huxley

To
speak and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but
a wise man speaks.
Ben Jonson

I
am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages
are the pedigrees of nations.
Samuel Johnson

Always
and never are two words you should always remember never to
use.
Wendell Johnson

Words
ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought
on the unthinking.
John Maynard Keynes

Words
ought to be a little wild for they are the assualts on the
unthinking.
John Maynard Keynes

Words
are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Rudyard Kipling

The
trouble with talking too fast is you may say something you
haven't thought of yet.
Ann Landers

Wisdom
is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd
have preferred to talk.
Doug Larson

If
the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be
an apostrophe with fur.
Doug Larson

A
spoonful of humor makes the message go down easier.
Frank Leahy

Language
is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of
which man knows nothing.
Claude Levi-Strauss

It
is better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool than
to open it and resolve all doubt.
Abraham Lincoln

He
can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any
man I ever met.
Abraham Lincoln

Good
communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just
as hard to sleep after.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Language
is the inventory of human experience.
L. W. Lockhart

Any
language is necessarily a finite system applied with different
degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations,
and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.
David Lodge

The
fewer words the better prayer.
Martin Luther

Arguments
over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM
versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers
versus briefs.
Jack Lynch